Version Innocent

  ***

  Jim Dawson terminated the connection with Damon Harding. He was tired. It seemed that all the energy was sucked out of him every time he spoke to the man. It was hard to believe that in his short time with the FBI he was working on a case of this importance with a number of agents at his direction. He had only been with the agency for ten years of the fifteen since his last restoration. It was typical for him as it was for many other primers. They tended to begin new careers shortly after a restoration and then to stick with them for twenty or thirty years. Then if they hadn't needed to be restored, try another one.

  Dawson had been many things in the last three hundred years. He was born fourteen years after the restoration technology had been invented in Seattle, before the children's cities. He had been a police officer, detective, and computer programmer back when computers still took up real estate on the top of a desk. After his first restoration he decided to try something new and had learned to play the saxophone,. He had become a professional musician playing jazz in New Orleans. Eventually he'd gotten tired of that too and moved on. Private eye, bounty hunter, he'd even tried his hand at writing. Not that he'd been any good at it. Dawson didn't need to work any more. Over the course of the last three hundred years of working he'd managed to stash enough away to meet his expenses, not that he had many. When he was young, during his first century, the rates of return on his investments had been great. He was making eight percent and society hadn't yet realized what it meant for the time value of money when you could live practically forever. Then when he was about ninety-five, the rates had started dropping, he hadn't seen a rate better than two percent in the last two centuries.

  These rates made it easy to borrow because the interest didn't kill you, but it also meant that anyone born today had a harder time socking the cash some where it could grow healthily and eventually free you from the bondage or work. Most Primers had managed to achieve financial independence; most Newbies hadn't. They would eventually, but it would take them a lot longer. Not that the Newbies seemed to care.

  After he failed at writing, Dawson had become a VR addict, totally refusing to face reality. It was a low point in his life, a life that at the time had seemed too long and pointless. He tried not to think about it too much, it just made him depressed. He had spent all his time in the data sphere VR environments, in stim it was called, where he could be anyone, do anything, and have any simulated woman he wanted. He'd never been that good with women, even though he'd been married to three and divorced, and had five-year contracts with another half dozen. They all ended up leaving him eventually or one of them would get restored and that always presented problems to a relationship.

  He had neglected to take care of himself and had only emerged from stim long enough to eat and return. If he'd had a little more foresight he might still be in stim, if he'd gotten a VR unit that took care of his body for him, like the other twenty percent of the population that lived entirely in stim through the data sphere. Eventually he'd had a heart attack, VR didn't keep your body from reacting to shocks, even virtual ones.

  The saddest thing about this chapter in his life was that since he had cut off contact with all of his friends and family for VR it took two months for anyone to discover that his body was dead. Everything changed though, once he was restored. He hadn't had a backup for six months before his death, he hadn’t wanted to, so the worst of the depression was thankfully lost forever to his previous version. But he had been told the story of how he died by his neural implant companion, Argus, who had watched him slowly kill himself, but was prevented from doing anything by the privacy restrictions ingrained by law. For a few months after he had been required to get professional help for his addiction so that he didn't relapse. It helped some. He had joined VR Addicts Anonymous and had been off the stim ever since then.

  It had seemed that he always gravitated towards investigative work, so he had gone back for some education in forensics, both electronic and physical. Then he had applied to the FBI, and after a recommendation by some of his long ago friends, who had become high placed in the government, been accepted for training as an Agent.

  The training had lasted for several years and after he was a full agent and had done well, his experience from all those years ago as a cop, a private eye and a bounty hunter had all mixed together to make him a good agent. He was also physically young, which always helped. It was a mystery, why no one had ever worked out a technology to keep the body young. The scientists claimed that it was because the human body aged, and there wasn't anything that could be done. Given this fact, everyone followed the same patterns: die, get restored and be physically young, get older and older until you either died by accident doing something crazy, killed your self or died of old age. Most people didn't die of old age; they lived for a few decades and then when their bodies were beginning to wear out, get sluggish, or unattractive, they went to the nearest euthanasia clinic, had themselves backed up, put down, and then restored to a new, young, healthy and, most of the time, attractive body. He had done it a few times himself.

  When your body was young, it didn't matter how old you really were, you felt young and you acted young. This had caused a lot of problems with his wives. If you didn't die at the same time, one of you would be biologically much older than the other, even if your originals had been born in the same year. Divorces followed as the younger one would pursue others with the same age factors, those being the biological age and total experience age, and the older would do the same.

  Dawson hadn't been with anyone in a while. He didn't feel the need at the moment to share his life with someone. Being an agent consumed his time, which was one reason he was doing well. But his body was getting on; it was almost forty years old in biological terms. It didn't work as well as it had any more. It was still pretty good, though, and it would be for at least another decade or two, as long as he stayed off the stim and got some exercise every day.

  But he was tired. Life grated on you, and it went on and on, so many versions. But he wasn't ready for permanent dissolution, to have all his backups purged and face the big death. That was too final, and he didn't believe in an after life either. Who would want one any way? Death was the way of getting away from living in any of its forms, once one had had enough of life.

  Dawson had been considering taking a hiatus next time his body died, get a break and just be non-corporeal for a few decades, then being restored to see what, if anything, had changed. Maybe it would give him a fresh perspective. Or maybe even a few centuries. It was supposed to be safe. Of course that was until the virus struck and three thousand had been lost, involuntarily permanent dissolution, murder That still rattled him. Losing some backups was no big deal, the living version could just make another, but to lose three thousand who had no corporeal version...that was something else. That was one of the main reasons he was on this case. The system needed to be safe and controlled. It was the only way for society as a whole to continue.

  One of his agents interrupted his thoughts asking about the programming of the micro-bugs that were observing Hughes at that moment. Storm had to be stopped. Dawson just hoped that they were doing the right thing by letting this old version of Storm be restored. He may lead them to 6.7 but he was an unknown quantity and “the guest” was the biggest enigma. It sounded to Dawson like an Primer was helping them in return for something. Something only the Newbies could provide. He had the feeling that whatever that something was, it was going to be trouble.